Sam Biddle

The Apollo program was long, arduous, tense, and very, very expensive. America's missile defense ambitions have been all of these things too. The Apollo program put humans on the moon. Missile defense has been a colossal failure. The cost? Equal.

Despite federal belt-tightening (or cutting off the belt entirely with a chainsaw), Congress has found a spare $8.6 billion to fund work on the US missile "shield"—a 1.2% increase from last year's budget.

This, despite the fact that the Pentagon has yet to find an effective way of shooting missiles out of the sky. Lasers, satellites, other missiles—nothing's worked well, and they've been trying for decades. All that trying (and failing) has racked up quite the bill: Bloomberg reports that failed missile defense has cost the US around $150 billion—the same amount we spent putting a man on the moon.

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What've we gotten for that chunk of change? Anti-ICBM facilities that are about as reassuring as me pointing a Nerf gun at the sky. Take the defensive silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, which sound a lot like my sophomore year dorm room:

They are battling mold in corridors leading to six underground silos that house rockets for shooting down enemy warheads. The mold and leaking pipes mean the installation must be replaced this year as part of a $1.16 billion fix for the national missile defense shield

Even the current next-best-futile-hope for missile defense, a Europe-based shield outlined by President Obama, is a DoD wet dream at best: "The system is highly fragile and brittle and will intercept warheads only by accident, if ever," explains MIT's Dr. Theodore Postol, himself a former Pentagon science advisor.

What else could we have spent $150,000,000,000 on? Anything else we might need? We could have at least taken $22 billion out of there to keep our boats from rusting apart. [Bloomberg via Danger Room]